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Amid high teacher turnover in disenfranchised neighborhoods, teachers who were raised in, live in, and teach in these neighborhoods demonstrate unwavering commitment to their students. Eight teachers from a major metropolitan city in the United States participated in 45–60-minute pláticas to discuss the joys, challenges, and needs of teaching in the neighborhood they grew up in, live(d) in, and teach/taught in. The data was analyzed using narrative inquiry approaches, from which portraitures of the participants were developed. The study found that teachers with a robust understanding of the sociopolitical context of the neighborhood and positive human relationships with people in their neighborhood intentionally chose to teach in the neighborhood they grew up in to provide dignity-affirming and liberatory education opportunities for their students. The teachers in this study do so by developing their students’ social consciousness, addressing socio-emotional needs with compassion, and fostering academic aptitude. While the study identified the forces that drive teacher commitment and longevity in the workplace, it also identified the need for educational leaders to adopt servant leadership strategies to implement effective strategies to support these teachers.

Too often educators are unable or unwilling to see the potential Black males have as students, and often view these young men as inhuman or uneducable. More specifically, teachers often ignore or underestimate that Black males experience education in a manner unlike their peers due to the historical construction of what it means to be a Black male. Given that K-12 students and teachers spend a significant amount of time together the teaching that occurs in classrooms can have a significant impact on student success within schools. What is often missing, not offered, not valued, or in need of re-emphasizing within the field of educational research is the need for Black males to theorize teaching. It is important to understand the type of pedagogical strategies that these young men believe will enrich their classroom experiences, which serves as the impetus for this exploratory study that seeks to answer how do Black males theorize (think, explain, and develop a set of ideas) notions of teaching. To develop a collective understanding of Black male students’ perceptions of effective teaching, a social constructivist qualitative research method was implemented. More specifically a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve Black male students who attended three urban high schools in southern California. Each of the interviews conducted were audio-taped and transcribed and lasted approximately 60 to 70 minutes. Three research questions that guided the study were: What are Black male secondary students’ perceptions of effective teaching? What are the strategies, approaches, and methods of teaching that Black male students describe that? What can teachers, researchers, and policymakers learn from Black male students’ understanding of effective teaching to better serve this student group in the classroom? Key findings revealed that the participants can articulate their thoughts about teaching with specificity by providing definitions of teaching, strategies that enhance their learning, and distinguishing between the act (teaching) and the person (the teacher). Moreover, too often the participants questioned the willingness of teachers to want to give their best instruction, make positive connections, and form relationships that will benefit their classroom success.

For the past decade, every year at least 1.2 million students in the United States have been identified as homeless. While many youth graduate high school despite experiencing homelessness, a large minority do not complete high school in four years. Not obtaining a high school diploma negatively impacts future opportunities for youth and increases their risk of becoming homeless as adults. This dissertation uses Los Angeles County as a case study to evaluate the formal and informal networks of support that high school students use to meet their academic and physiological needs to remain housed and graduate high school. This study is guided by three main questions: (1) How does Los Angeles County support students experiencing homelessness in their pursuit to graduate high school? (2) How do students in Los Angeles County navigate the barriers of homelessness and successfully graduate high school? (3) How do school districts in Los Angeles County successfully support students experiencing homelessness in their pursuit to graduate high school? Data for this study come from 63 interviews with formerly homeless youth, youth experiencing homelessness, teachers, counselors, principals, district homeless liaisons, community-based organizations, and city and county homeless administrative leaders, as well as school district site observations, and a review of 890 city, county, and state documents. The study considers structural racism when assessing county and school district level strategies that support the needs of students experiencing homelessness.Major findings speak to a phenomenon this dissertation coins as Impoverished Institutional Network (IIN). An impoverished institutional network is defined as a public institution’s inability to provide the necessary financial, social, cultural, and organizational capital to adequately support historically marginalized, vulnerable populations, thereby becoming overly reliant on punitive practices or punitive public institutions like the criminal justice and foster care systems to serve those populations. While youth and some school personnel interviewed in this study exhibited a high degree of agency, their efficacy was limited by the networks to which they were relegated.This dissertation is the first comprehensive study on student homelessness that utilizes a municipal county as the unit of analysis. Additionally, this dissertation introduces IIN as a new construct for assessing a school districts' ability to respond to student homelessness.

This study explores the extent to which academic fields of study can explain the urban fabric of Los Angeles, a preeminent site of post-industrialization and the burgeoning global cultural economy. Relationships with gentrification are explicitly examined, shedding light on the mutual dependence between cultural capital-driven reproduction in higher education and the active (re)structuring of the urban environment. Spatial analysis techniques draw on data from the US Census American Community Survey and a community college in Los Angeles County, with findings revealing the importance of lateral structural divisions and processes to empirical, theoretical, and policy debates over inequality in education, housing, and other areas of urban life.

In recent years, the marginal status of Latino boys has garnered political attention. From the Obama Foundation to California’s Select Committee on Boys and Men of Color, these policy makers center around an alleged commitment to academic success. Few studies, however, focus on the experiences of high-performing Latino boys and employ a critique of “merit” itself. My dissertation research probes further with a three-fold purpose: (1) examine the way political discourses via government documents and mainstream media construct notions of merit and deservingness, (2) examine the way high-performing Latino boys resist or reproduce political discourses, and (3) examine the experiences of high-performing Latino boys via a social justice curriculum. My dissertation takes place at a high school in the Bay Area of Northern California and highlights the experiences of 14 Latino boys as they apply to top-tier universities. I employ the lenses of Critical Social Theory and Critical Discourse Studies to conduct a content analysis of political discourse and media coverage, as well as ethnographic methods to examine the experiences of high-performing Latino boys. This work aims to challenge our understanding of academic success—going beyond cognitive skill sets into a more social, political, and performative realm. Central to this work is a critical examination of the role of race, gender, and neoliberalism in shaping political discourses and student trajectories. Special attention to resistance, social reproduction, and Latino male identity will provide fruitful avenues to reimagine education and build transformative academic spaces.

This dissertation examines the experiences of the Roses in Concrete Community School (RiC) in East Oakland, California. Conceived as a counter-hegemonic schooling project, RiC responded to the community’s demand for self-determination in education; the school’s founders sought to fulfill this demand by designing a school organized around a culturally sustaining/revitalizing and healing-centered program dedicated to serving predominantly Black and Latinx children and families of Oakland. This project centers on a central research question: How does a school that was deliberately designed to counter the adverse conditions in a low-income urban community meet the social-emotional and academic needs of the students and communities it serves? I conceptualize the theoretical framework of Frontier Education, or white settler colonial schooling practices, and schooling as marronage, or liberatory schooling practices grounded in autonomous community and freedom, to guide this analysis. Decolonizing, critical Indigenous, and critical race methodologies also guide the data collection strategy used in this research. Using a critical ethnographic case study approach, I analyzed observations, documents, and interviews with key stakeholders from the school’s design stage in 2014 until its fifth year of operation in 2020. Three key findings emerged from this case study. First, RiC successfully adopted a community responsive approach to student and family engagement, prioritized an alternative model of student success embodied by the concept of the Warrior Scholar, utilized an Ethnic Studies-based, Spanish-English dual immersion, arts-oriented social justice educational program, and worked in solidarity with students and families. Second, the school’s approach to healing and transformation responded to harm at the community and individual level. Third, despite its efforts and significant accomplishments, the school encountered obstacles in building the long-term capacity of faculty and staff to meet the needs of stakeholders. Despite these challenges, RiC offers an example of education being used to forward social change and disrupt hopelessness that all educators can learn from. The conclusion explores the implications of this case study for teachers and school leaders who seek to pursue a social justice educational agenda.

Emerging research shows that more than half of all U.S. children have experienced some kind of trauma in the form of abuse, neglect, violence, or challenging household circumstances—and 35 percent of children have experienced more than one type of traumatic event (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016). In this study— Literacies of Love: Trauma, Healing and Pedagogical Shifts in an English Classroom—I draw from, blend, and synthesize existing research in the fields of public health, social epidemiology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, Ethnic Studies, and education to achieve a more robust understanding of trauma, its effects, and existing interventions. I then draw from these aforementioned fields to highlight a grotesquely under-theorized, but widely agreed upon intervention to child trauma: loving relationships (Ginwright, 2016; Duncan-Andrade, 2009; Perry, 2007; Siegel & Solomon, 2003, Van Der Kolk, 2014). Drawing on a corpus of data collected throughout my tenure as a teacher-researcher, I integrate student work, interviews, focus groups, reflections, videos, and journal entries to conceptualize love and illustrate how to cultivate loving relationships and literacies within an English classroom. Through qualitative analysis, including discourse, media, and document analysis, my dissertation highlights the strong corollary between literacy practices and loving relationships to self, classroom, and community. This research is timely, coinciding with significant shifts in the field towards trauma-informed pedagogies and social-emotional learning. Moreover, this study will make a valuable contribution to educational research at the intersection of trauma-informed pedagogies, critical literacy, and urban education.

A growing number of school districts are seeking to remedy the high dropout rates and achievement gap experienced by Latino boys through Latino male mentorship programs. Indicative of neoliberal shifts in urban education, these programs often involve public-private partnerships and represent a new ideological blending of Latinx community interests and corporate philanthropic goals. This dissertation asks: How is Latino masculinity framed and constructed in the neoliberal era of urban education? To answer this question, I conducted an ethnographic case study of Latino Male Success (LMS; pseudonym), a Latino male mentorship program run by a non-profit organization servicing 10 middle and high schools in an urban school district in California. Data collection for this study consisted of two years of ethnographic research including 40 interviews, document and curriculum analysis, and over 500 hours of classroom observations. Three main findings emerged from this study. First, dependence on philanthropy and the need to cater to wealthy donors resulted in a cultural deficit framing of Latino male mentorship in the program’s mission and curriculum. This approach obscured structural racism and centered the boys’ behavior as the primary source of underachievement by implicitly or explicitly positing them as disinterested in school, potentially violent, and in need of cultural change. Second, LMS day-to-day lessons and activities deprioritized a critical race and gender consciousness and cultivated an ideal Latino masculinity characterized by the neoliberal values of meritocratic individualism, benevolent hetero-patriarchy, and smart consumerism. Third, mentors and students also resisted the neoliberal logics that framed LMS. Select mentors taught extra-curricular and politically charged lessons centering racism and collective struggle, while students engaged in small moments of subversion enacted through repudiations of respectability, collective hopes, and loving, queer moments.By integrating critical and intersectional theories of race, gender, sexuality into my analysis, this research provides a timely addition to the literature on educational empowerment programs for boys and men of color. In contrast to scholarship that prioritizes an analysis of school punishment and pushout, my work reveals the profound impact educational empowerment projects have on influencing Latino male identity and learning experiences. My findings demonstrate the ways problematic racial and gender politics remain prevalent in these programs despite a rhetoric of racial uplift. Through tracing the intersectional racial politics of neoliberalism guiding Latino Male Success, this work sheds new light on the ways educational philanthropic foundations and non-profits shape racial formation in U.S. schools.

There has been a call for teachers of Color to meet the growing diversity of the student population in the United States. Research on teachers of Color, their identities, experiences, and the ways they leverage their identities in the work they do to support students of Color has largely omitted the perspectives of Asian American teachers. Through a sociocultural lens of identity and Asian Critical Race perspective, this study investigates the ways a group of Asian American teachers articulate their identities and the ways their identities shape and emerge in their practice with diverse students. Findings reveal Asian American teachers articulate their identity in oppositional ways to their ideas of “the other.” With respect to teaching, identities emerge in their practice in the ways they actively engage in conversations with students to dispel stereotypes, share their Asian American culture, and navigate a racial in-between space in having broader discussion around race. Implications from this study suggest a need for dedicated spaces for Asian American teachers to unpack and reflect on the range of identities and experiences they bring to teaching, as well as the ways identity and practice mutually shape each other.

Formerly incarcerated youth often have low educational attainment following incarceration, leaving them at high risk for unstable employment and contact with the adult criminal justice system. Once they age out of traditional high school, community-based alternative schools are often the last option for these youth to earn their high school diploma or GED or receive vocational training. While commitment to conventional activities (i.e., school and work) is known to prevent recidivism, less is known about how community-based alternative schools facilitate community reintegration among formerly incarcerated youth. Guided by an educational resilience framework, this case study explored the elements of a community-based alternative school that provides education and vocational training to formerly incarcerated young adults aged 18 to 25. The research focuses specifically on young Black men as they are disproportionately pushed out of traditional schools and into the juvenile justice system, and are at high risk for school failure and recidivism. Data collection consisted of 12 months of observational field research, semi-structured interviews with four school employees and eight Black men students, one focus group with program case managers, and a review of school, classroom, and student documents. Each data source was analyzed and interpreted thematically using a three-step coding procedure that included initial, focused, and axial coding. Constant comparisons and memoing were also used to establish analytic distinctions and to generate meanings. Study findings point to several important areas: (1) subjective definitions of successful community reintegration based on organizational goals and formerly incarcerated young Black men’s personal philosophies of survival; (2) culturally-relevant curriculum as a vehicle for academic achievement and social-emotional development; and (3) supportive services as a factor that influences academic engagement and persistence. Findings from this research highlight the important role relationships and space and place play in bolstering students’ resilience during their school reentry process. This knowledge is also significant given the move to shift the incarcerated population into community-based alternatives, and it is timely given bipartisan support to reverse the trend of mass incarceration.

This case study examined competence in two third-grade classrooms where teachers centered children’s mathematical thinking in instructional decision-making. Offering a synthesis of sociocultural characterizations of competence, and drawing from a variety of data sources including classroom video, student work and assessments, and teacher interviews, this study investigated how competence was assigned, the forms of participation assigned competence, and how these particular constructions of competence shaped the mathematics that students learned and the kinds of agency they exercised. Analyses revealed two predominant ways of participating shared across both classrooms—providing explanation and engaging with others’ mathematical ideas. Constructing competence around and in relation to students’ explanations and engagement with each other’s ideas created space for students to participate and be positioned competently for making a wide variety of contributions, including ways of contributing available when their understanding of the mathematics was still emerging. The two classrooms surfaced and built upon students’ partial understandings in different ways, leveraging students’ explanations and engagement with each other’s ideas to support individuals to take up their space in class discussions while also advancing instructional goals. Analyses of an end-of-year problem solving assessment demonstrated that students developed a strong understanding of multiplication and division, both in relation to their own prior achievement as well as to that of their peers across the state. Thus, both classrooms expanded collective notions of competence, and were successful in supporting students to demonstrate their mathematical learning. The findings of this study illustrate the relational nature of competence, and suggest that examining competence in relation to children’s thinking can provide a potential way to bring together learning about who children are and how they participate, the details of their mathematical thinking, and the contexts in which particular instructional practices are effective.

This action research study investigated the collaborative process of teachers developing a single-sex intervention for street-life oriented Black and Latino males. Traditional schooling efforts have largely failed to address the needs of Black and Latino males who are street-life oriented, thus this population remains among the most underserved and over-disciplined in our school system (Conchas & Vigil, 2010; Payne, Starks, & Gibson, 2009). Although a litany of national and local efforts have been enacted to close the achievement gap, they have failed to boost the educational outcomes of street-life oriented Black and Latino boys. This study examined the process by which a diverse set of teachers collaborated as a community of practice to address this difficult problem at their own school site. The action research team collected survey and interview data to explore the challenges and successes of existing support systems at their urban public high school. Their aim was to discover any gaps in support that could be filled with a new intervention. The team was surprised to discover that none of the intervention systems at their site are specifically designed for street-life oriented youth despite a widespread belief that at least one of the available interventions is. In lieu of developing a new intervention that would address the school’s areas of weakness, the team recommended that school leaders explore ways to partner with existing interventions to strategically support their population of street-life oriented youth that was being overlooked. The process by which the team conducted its action research was reliant on an essential element of freedom for teachers to direct and mutually engage in their own collaboration. Participants reported feeling a sense of community and trust that allowed them to work through disagreements and share accountability. As compared to other teacher collaboration at their site, participants felt that this collaboration was more effective and that it better reflected their ideal of what teacher collaboration should look like. The study ultimately demonstrates that if given space to drive their own collaboration, a team of teachers can purposefully address a problem at their own site as engaged agents of change.

This dissertation researches how educational inequality is reproduced by the intersection of identity, face-to-face interaction and the politics of contested meaning. Using ethnographic field methods, I explore how a disrespectful classroom culture is initiated by societal forces such as racism, classism, anti-immigrant beliefs, community narrative, and neighborhood context, but more importantly co-produced by teachers and students inside the classroom.To uncover the dynamic role (dis)respect plays in schooling, I draw from theories of symbolic interactionism to examine teachers’ and students’ divergent interpretations and meanings of (dis)respect. In doing so, I offer a theoretically grounded and evidence-based argument of how meanings and practices associated with (dis)respect matter to student engagement and teacher-student relationships. As this project demonstrates, student-teacher conflict does not arise from students’ oppositional attitude to education or authority, or stem from a warped sense of respect, but occurs as a reaction to feeling disrespected by their teachers. In response, students use a “reprisal process” as a strategy to protect their identities and retain the respect of their peers, which many teachers interpret and label as disrespectful. Data suggests the vast majority of students do respect and accept the authority of teachers and desire, even crave respect from their teachers, however, teachers’ ideas of (dis)respect are also mediated by their identities and a belief that respect is asymmetrical. In turn, the struggle for respect ensues leaving teachers and students feeling equally wounded, unrecognized, and suffering from the politics of contested meanings of (dis)respect. Together, this influences a disrespectful school culture that contributes directly to failure for some students and indirectly to a sense of alienation for all students. As defined in this study, the meaning students and teachers attach to (dis)respectful interaction is both shared and contested, but ultimately driven by identities that intersect with face-to-face interaction that impacts the everyday lives of the individuals I studied. Thus, the central contention of my doctoral work is that the concept of respect holds theoretical and social significance as it is co-produced within the school setting.

The science community has an extensive history of exclusivity at multiple stages, including the P-20 education and professional levels. African American girls remain an underrepresented population within the STEM-fields despite their demonstrated interest and aptitude in science. Within the STEM-circuit, African American girls who once showed interest and promise in STEM, are pushed out due to negative experiences within science spaces where many are marginalized and their interests are suppressed. Critical science education scholars have called for culturally relevant pedagogical practices that honor the cultures and experiences of students of color (Emdin, 2010) and science education scholars have led the charge to examine the experiences and identity development of girls of color in science (Calabrese Barton, et al. 2012; Hanson, 2009). This study builds on preexisting work by centering its focus on the science identity development of African American girls within a culturally relevant science counterspace. To challenge the dominant discourse concerning their science education experiences, their identity development is analyzed through a critical race, Black feminist theoretical lens. Through a multiple qualitative methods design, this project illuminates the identity development of African American girls within the counterspace by utilizing a three-dimensional model that examines their competence, performance, and recognition in science (Carlone & Johnson, 2007). The culturally relevant curriculum employed within the counterspace allowed participants to learn through their interests and build critical consciousness through engaging in meaningful dialogue concerning the role of race and gender on the underrepresentation of African American women in STEM.

The current historical moment is marked by extreme forms of racialized violence, antiblackness, and political repression on the one hand, and a surge of highly-energized, highly-visible race-specific forms of political and racialized resistance on the other. Situated within the contradictions, tensions, and possibilities of the times, several exclusively Black counterpublics have emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area in the form of intentional all-Black classes, spatially situated within a larger school. These spaces provide an exceptional opportunity to explore the transformative potential of spaces that eschew theories of a colorblind, post-race society and confront race and racialization directly. To this end, I utilize BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016), Fraser’s (1990) subaltern counterpublic, and hooks’ (1990) notion of homeplaces and the margin, to theorize about what I call, Black educational sovereign spaces, intentional all-Black counterpublics constructed within the context of multi-racial/ethnic, diverse school settings for the purpose of supporting Black students in racially-specific ways. Drawing on interviews with Black girl students and a Black woman educator, and classroom observations, this study explores one distinct Black educational sovereign space: An all Black, all female, young women’s studies class at a public high school in an urban district in Northern California. This manuscript constructs an ethnographic case study that explores both the ways Black girls are racialized and hypersexualized in schools, and also, the numerous ways their production of Black Girl Space facilitates a reimagining of a Black girl identity, and the development of a radical Black subjectivity. This work contributes a theorization of Black space in education and findings have implications for our understanding of the ways purposefully constructed Black educational sovereign spaces can serve to mitigate students’ racialized experiences and facilitate students’ construction of identities that reimagine problematic notions of blackness that confront them in society and in school.

Given that teacher professional development is a part of teachers’ professional lives and given that billions of dollars have been invested in teacher professional development, this dissertation advocates for research that studies teacher learning and the conditions under which they learn, as an equally important component of studying the impact of professional development on students’ test scores, achievement, and/or learning. The Pathway Project, a research-based literacy professional development program, served as the study context. The Pathway Project provides teachers with tools to use in their practice to support students in reading and writing using a cognitive strategies approach (Olson & Land, 2007). Using data in the form of observational protocols, survey measures, teacher focus groups, and field notes, as well as, qualitative analytic methods, I investigated: (1) how teachers appropriated Pathway tools for their practice; (2) teachers’ perceptions about their participation in the Pathway Project and subsequent impact on student perceptions and learning; and (3) how the Pathway Project design impacted opportunities for teachers’ learning. My findings are centralized around the role tools play in teachers’ enactment of the Pathway Project, teachers’ perceptions, and the design of professional development. Data analysis revealed that teachers appropriated the tools in a variety of ways. The teachers responded positively to tools that were easy or moderately easy to implement and they were more willing to use these tools and often used them soon after they were introduced. I also found that the teachers perceived the Pathway Project as a valuable experience and mainly spoke of the ease of implementation of Pathway tools to help their students read and write more analytically. Importantly, they found assessment tools to be more difficult to navigate. Their students also had positive perceptions, noting that they did more writing, worked harder, and scored significantly better on an on-demand writing assessment. Finally, the design of the Pathway Project professional development program afforded teachers numerous opportunities to grow as professionals, yet they were limited in their opportunities to enact and collaboratively reflect on their practice. Implications for the design of literacy professional development will be presented.

ABSTRACTIt’s NOT Whatever: How teacher leaders and novice teachers develop as “politically determined pedagogues” within an urban high schoolbyGerald Tiglao ReyesDoctor of Philosophy in EducationUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Jabari Mahiri, ChairImplementing effective teacher development is one of the most critical aspects of school improvement. This study examines the cultural and structural nature and eventual outcomes of a politically relevant teacher development process in an urban high school that has a specific mission for its teachers to become humanizing, critically conscious, intellectual, and reflective practitioners. This critical participant research examined how three teacher leaders and three novice teachers of color representing English, social studies, and Science departments were facilitated within the school to make sense of and develop as what came to be termed “Politically Determined Pedagogues.” Data utilized for this study included existing school documents from the site, participant meetings, participant narratives, observations of participants during school organized teacher collaborations, participant interviews, field notes, and memos. Data was analyzed by initially coding to develop specific categories and eventual themes to capture the nature of focal participant activities within and across several cycles of the teacher development process. The findings illuminate a dynamic and systemic process of teacher development as humanizing, critically conscious, intellectually engaged, and reflective practitioners within the context of a School Cohesion Container as a framework. Within this framework, nurturing teachers’ political perspectives as Politically Determined Pedagogues was operationalized in a way that could be adapted for teacher development in other urban schools as well as for teacher preparation programs.

Decolonizing pedagogy requires teachers and students challenge classical and present day colonial colonialism. Questions arise when examining the implementation of such practices in the elementary classroom, especially since the passing of the Common Core: Is it possible to implement such pedagogy in the midst of restrictive standards and dehumanizing testing? With the recent shift to the Common Core in California, few examples of transformative applications exist at the elementary level, and even less with decolonization as a central focus. The purpose of this study is to examine the practical realities of implementing a critical decolonizing pedagogy in a Common Core elementary classroom. The following questions guide this study:1-What are the colonizing conditions facing an elementary decolonial educator? a.How does a decolonial educator navigate, confront and address these conditions in her classroom? 2-How do the classroom, the youth, the community, and my experiences transform my pedagogy along the way? 3-How do I as an educator, develop the support you need to confront your own traumas of teaching under colonial conditions?Using a mixed methods approach, blending autoethnography and portraiture, data was collected throughout the 2012-2014 school year, and consisted of observations, artifacts and field notes from a public school in Los Angeles. The fifth grade classroom was in a low-income urban community of color in South Central Los Angeles, comprised mostly of Latino and Black students. Multiple examples of decolonial curriculum were possible within language arts and social studies common core standards. Despite limitations in the classroom schedule, activities addressing student trauma were imbedded throughout the year, in both academic and informal settings. Substantial constraints were found within standardized testing, both with the state-wide assessments online, as well as with the project-based assessment for the school district. Lastly, participation within a collective of decolonial educators was necessary to sustain such classroom practices and resist colonial practices being encouraged by the school and district.

Efforts towards urban school reform regularly overlook the complex socio-cultural contexts in which Black female students are situated and the ways in which their subordination is regularly perpetuated in schools. The propagation of urban misogyny in youth popular culture and corresponding reductive media narratives that position young Black women as hypersexual, aggressive, and anti-intellectual profoundly influence the evolving identities of these youth. This reality--coupled with the unremitting urging by policymakers for educators to align curriculum with standardized tests--has created classroom contexts that disregard the educational needs and cultural subjectivities of these youth. Drawing from a Black feminist framework, this study involves analyzing Black feminist pedagogical practices employed for two years during the author's recent research as an English teacher at a public South Los Angeles high school. Specifically, a qualitative methodology is utilized to explore the immediate and long-term impact of a Black feminist curriculum on African-American female students' orientation towards schooland the development of their racial/ethnic and gender identities. This research offers concrete examples of pedagogical processes that engender self-actualization and an authentic craving for cultural and intellectual empowerment among young Black women. Implications for classroompedagogy, and teacher education are explored.

The distribution of well-prepared and experienced teacher has been a policy concerns for decades. Research has established that schools serving concentrations of historically underserved students struggle disproportionately to attract and retain teachers, resulting in the most vulnerable students being taught by the least qualified teachers--teachers with minimal professional preparation or experience (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2005; Lankford, Loeb & Wycoff, 2002). These schools have also been found to struggle the most with high degrees of teacher turnover (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Shen, 1997). However, research has also documented that while many schools serving high-need student populations struggle mightily with teacher turnover, some do not, and turnover differences between schools with similar student demographics are more significant than between schools with different student demographics (DeAngelis & Presley, 2011; Ingersoll,1995; Johnson, Kraft & Papay, 2011). Furthermore, a compelling link between teacher turnover and student achievement (Ronfeldt, Loeb & Wyckoff, 2013) has incited policy interest on how to recruit and retain more well-prepared and experienced teachers to the schools that need them the most. This dissertation examines teacher recruitment and retention at one high-need urban school that demonstrates all of the markers of high teacher turnover but, in fact, does not struggle to attract and retain experienced teachers. The study utilizes a single-case case-study design and ethnographic methods to investigate what attracts teachers to the school, how teachers are recruited and hired, and what organizational conditions contribute to their decisions to remain teaching at the school (i.e., retention). The study was conducted over the course of an academic year and data sources include thirty-two semi-structured interviews with teachers and administrators, field notes of observations, and school-related documents. Findings revealed that a hiring orientation to finding teachers that "fit" at the school played a significant role in teachers experiencing job satisfaction and demonstrating high organizational commitment, two variables that are associated with retention. Findings also found that the school's culture and organizational identity were fundamental in attracting teachers to the school who shared the school's orientation to urban teaching, contributing to the phenomenon of "fit." This dissertation makes a contribution to two bodies of literature. First, it contributes to studies on urban teacher hiring by documenting the mechanisms that bring experienced teachers to a high-need school. It also adds to organizational analyses of schools as workplaces by investigating the conditions that support and retain teachers.

This study examines the potential of mobile media and gameplay to develop critically literate, civically engaged inner-city high school students. Theoretically, this study is based on tenets of critical pedagogy as well as sociocultural and critical literacies theory. I also look to research on civic engagement and gameplay in structuring parts of this study. Conducted over the course of a year, this study was divided into two phases. First, I conducted a qualitative study of student social practices with mobile media devices in an urban school. Conducting observations, focus groups, and interviews, this data focused on the student perspective of mobile device use within the school space. Inductively coded for the patterns and practices of mobile use, I analyzed this data to develop a framework for a wireless critical pedagogy and a curriculum to teach a class of ninth grade English students within the school site. In the second phase of this study I taught the curriculum developed during my qualitative analysis of student mobile use. Handing out a set of iPods to the students in the English class, I led the class through an alternate reality game that I created. "Ask Anansi" was a game that guided in-class youth participatory action research and critical literacy development. During the game, students identified areas of inequity to research and document, created and participated in a campus-wide scavenger hunt, and edited their school's Wikipedia page. Daily fieldnotes, audio-recordings of the classroom interactions, and student work were coded and analyzed. This study found that most students perceived time at school as fluidly social and academic. Students also demonstrated limited opportunities for civic engagement as a result of mobile device use and illustrated that leveraging mobile devices for academic purposes in schools was largely a matter of mutual trust between teachers and students. Findings from the second half of this study revealed how mobile devices and games could cultivate youth research and engagement in issues of equity within their school environments. The nature of producing and interpreting media on mobile devices also signaled shifts in reading and literacies for today's youth.

The alarming rates of educational failure of minority youth, where middle class white and Asian students repeatedly outperform their low-income Latino and African American peers, require educational programs or policies that will improve the life outcomes of minority students (G�ndara & Contreras, 2009; J. Lee, 2006; Thernstrom & Therstrom, 2003). A college going culture and the development of social capital in school settings has been found to improve academic outcomes for underrepresented minority students (Allen, Kimura-Walsh, & Griffin, 2009a; Gibson, Gandara, & Koyama, 2004; Stanton-Salazar, 2010). Research has also demonstrated how school-based employment programs for low-income minority students can benefit students if and only it is complemented with a rigorous academic curriculum (Oakes & Saunders, 2008). The research on Catholic schools shows their ability to produce successful outcomes for African American and Latino students (Bryk, Lee, & Holland, 1993) . This study examines two urban Catholic high schools and how they construct opportunities for their low income Latino and African American male students. The project also determines if one school in particular, (which only accepts students from low income backgrounds) can develop critical forms of social and cultural capital through their unique corporate work study experience. Employing a mixed methods approach, the year-long study includes the following data: 1) ethnographic field notes; 2) interviews with students, school staff and alumni; 3) a student and alumni survey and 4) student data. The study uses ethnographic research methods to understand how each school facilitates a college going culture, and particularly a college-going discourse. Survey data and observations suggest that both schools develop social capital for students through a sense of family and/or multistranded relationships to mitigate the boundaries between student and institutional agents. Extracurricular activities and religious activities serve as important school structures that develop peer social capital through a sense of brotherhood. Interview data demonstrates students develop social capital and obtain access to dominant forms of cultural capital through their work study experience, but some students experience cultural dissonance with dominant cultural capital. Urban Catholic schools are encouraged to utilize the non-dominant culture to best serve low income underrepresented minority youth.

American poet William Carlos Williams once wrote, "It is difficult to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day from lack of what is found there." This line speaks to the crucial but often unacknowledged importance of literature in helping citizens to understand and analyze the major challenges that our society faces. Indeed, despite the relationship between literacy and democracy in practice, the fields of literacy and civic education have operated largely in isolation and privileged standardized test preparation and economic competitiveness over meaningful preparation for collective public life. As a result, two interrelated challenges inform my dissertation research: the lack of meaningful civic learning opportunities and the lack of high-quality literacy instruction, specifically with regard to low-income students of color in urban schools.This study seeks to re-envision literacy instruction as a critical civic activity that helps students and teachers create new ways of understanding and transforming a complex, often unequal society. My mixed-methods study utilizes a nationwide survey of over 300 high school English teachers and ethnographic case studies of three high school English classrooms in Los Angeles to answer the following questions: How do high school English teachers conceptualize `good' citizenship and the purposes of literacy instruction? How do the civic experiences and attitudes of teachers relate to the practices they introduce to their classrooms? How do students and teachers negotiate civic identities through shared engagement in literacy practices?This study puts critical theories of democracy, literacy, and classroom practice that have traditionally stood alone into productive conversation with each other in order to frame new critical classroom research. The use of critical ethnographic observation provided insight into the micro-processes through which students and teachers construct meanings about literacy and democracy, while survey research targeting a larger, purposeful sample of English teachers from across the country also provided valuable information about the ways that educators think about the purposes of their discipline.Major findings from my work indicate that teachers nationwide rank preparation for civic and political life as an important purpose of English education and conceptualize literary texts as powerful tools of civic learning that spur discussion and analysis of complex and controversial social issues. Teachers from low-income and high-minority schools are more likely to connect literacy to civic empowerment and develop curriculum that pushes students to use literacy to improve society. Indeed, the teachers in my study encouraged students to use reading and writing skills in conjunction with digital literacy tools to interact with civic leaders and develop community action projects about local issues. Nevertheless, teachers continually negotiate barriers to connecting literacy development to civic learning that must be addressed, particularly the pressures of standardized testing and high-stakes accountability systems.My research offers insight into innovative classroom practices that can transform the way we prepare teachers, educate students, and conceptualize the purpose of literacy and civic education in public education policy. It provides strategies that aim to create a more robust, diverse democracy through empowering urban youth of color academically and civically.

Significant research reveals that youth who reside in neighborhoods of high crime and violence can often be exposed to external stressors that result in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). These youths are disproportionately Black, and this condition often goes untreated. Consequently, their challenges with PTSD can surface and have tremendous impacts on teaching and learning at the schools they attend. These impacts include severe problems with academic achievement and discipline. The site of this research is a public, urban continuation high school in Northern California where many students exhibit symptoms of PTSD. This study explored the outcomes of professional development (PD) sessions designed to better prepare teachers to work with students who have exhibited behaviors connected to traumatic experiences. A mental health therapist led the first two sessions and assisted a focal teacher who was certified in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in presenting the final session. Data sources are videotapes of the PD sessions, audio taped interviews of participating teachers, teacher surveys, observations, and field note documentation of the teachers' classroom instruction. Findings indicated that teachers found the PD sessions highly effective in helping them to better understand student behaviors as well as ways that they themselves were vicariously affected by their students' traumatic experiences. This study also found that mental health training helped teachers re-conceptualize their approaches to curriculum and instruction. Finally, this research explored the effects of the PD on implementation across the range of disciplines that were taught. A key implication is that when mental health training is incorporated into PD in urban schools, ameliorative impacts for both students and teachers are achieved. Teachers who learn about the effects of and pedagogical responses to PTSD are better prepared to create effective learning environments for traumatized students.

Providing quality educational opportunities for minority children in poor, urban neighborhoods presents a significant and urgent problem for educators, activists, researchers and community members. To begin to address this problem, it is essential to clearly define the various components of the situation and be succinct about the questions we are trying to answer. This dissertation specifically addresses the issue of family resources and how the existence or lack thereof can profoundly affect students' home lives, which in turn affects their ability to perform in school. The project documents and analyzes the creation of a Family Resource Center (FRC) at a small school in a diverse, urban neighborhood, where most families live below the poverty line. The project documented here is a case study in the form of a "committed experiment," because the researcher was also intricately involved in the creation of the FRC over the course of the two and a half year study. The current literature is markedly sparse in terms of studies examining effective models for developing Family Resource Centers in urban communities. The literature on full-service schools comes close and has provided a framework for the preliminary steps in creating the FRC in this study. In order to fully develop the literature base, I drew from three additional literatures: Parent Involvement, Consultee-Centered Consultation and Popular Education. These four areas of literature together build on each other to create a strong foundation for the creation of the FRC. This study presents multiple findings. First, chapter 2 demonstrates the different perceptions of school staff and parents regarding the most important aspects of the FRC. Namely, the parents interviewed focused on the importance of the space itself while the school staff members interviewed named specific resources that might be offered. In chapter 3, a study within this study, which involved three parents in a Participatory Action Research project on parent involvement, laid the foundation for the development of our parent involvement practices of parent-focused conversations, establishing a safe space, and creating a `backdoor' to the school. Finally, chapter 4 articulates the unique training process used to support parent employees in their work with families in need. The training method combines the philosophy and methods of Consultee-Centered Consultation, a mental health training model designed to support non-mental health professionals engaged in difficult cases, with Popular Education, an empowering process of engaging community members as experts in solving the problem at hand. This chapter also demonstrates the methods of parent engagement and support developed by the parent employees themselves through their experience and the daily reflective process that was part of their training. The conclusion further develops these findings into a multifaceted theory of FRC development and parent empowerment through education and action. The model focuses on engaging parents as equals, utilizing their knowledge and expertise to drive the creation of the FRC, and to successfully bridge the long-standing divide of culture, values, class and experience between school staff and disenfranchised parents within poor, urban communities.

The constraining role of racial, social, and economic stratification on the lives and education of African American males has been argued both theoretically and empirically (Massey, 2007; MacLeod, 1987; Noguera, 2001). Some have argued that one important mechanism is the perception of limited opportunity structures (Noguera, 2004; Ogbu, 1987). This dissertation explored how real and perceived opportunity structures were shaped by political, social, and economic forces in an urban neighborhood. Specifically, this study focused on a core group of Black males in a bounded historical time and geographic locale and explored how life pathways were identified, conveyed, and chosen. This study was historically situated in the period starting with the inception of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966, until the time of the death of its co-founder, Huey P. Newton in 1989. This study argued that the complex interplay of competing ideologies that arose during that time period was at the crux of redefining Black life pathways to achieving the American Dream, also conveying the outcomes from that pursuit. This study took place in Oakland, California as this was the birthplace of the Black Panthers and it focused on the Oak Knoll neighborhood. I explored the ways in which the Black Power movement, the burgeoning drug epidemic, and State suppression in post-industrial Oakland informed how a cohort of over 40 Black males made sense of their societal positionality and how that 'sense making' influenced their choice of pathways and life outcomes. I will draw on Critical Race Theory in order to examine the ways in which race and power were central in the choices youth perceived, communicated, and enacted (Crenshaw, 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Methodologically, I will utilize interviews with members of the cohort, biographical narratives, primary and secondary sources, with the dissertation taking the form of an autoethnography of the block cohort. Primary and secondary sources will be employed to give a historical context to the time period and to contextualize the differing pathways. Interviews with cohort members and the development of autoethnographical narratives will focus on what I am calling 'block pedagogy', which I define as the organic community discourse that reflects the constant negotiation of identity, power and privileged knowledge, informed by the historical context. A focus on 'block pedagogy' (as remembered by informants) will be used to illuminate alternative/oppositional life pathways that were available to this cohort and how those options were developed and conveyed across the cohort through the use of privileged knowledge. Ultimately, this study will contribute to our understanding of the ways in which the multiple spheres of societal contact--with the power structure, Black radicalism, and criminality--resulted in identity-shaping knowledge. In doing so, it will document the ever-changing nature of oppression and community response to it: both in ways that subvert and reproduce existing oppressive social structures.

"We all go to school...nobody wants to be here, but that's the way it is! Everyone's got to get schooled." Countless hours committed to classroom, playground and homework naturalize an otherwise arbitrary arrangement best understood as "getting schooled." School participants fundamentally understand this education process is about acquiring explicit systematic instruction. This dissertation presents the school experience as a place of multiple meanings where Intra-ethnic differentiation examines the process of identity categories among adolescents within a Chicano-Latino community set in a South Central middle school of Los Angeles, California. This study documents the multiple categories as intra-ethnic differentiation among Chicano Latino school youth, defined as an experience of community fragmentation where members express distinct in-group differences that contrast an external appearance of homogeneity and or solidarity; fragmented into multiple dynamic identities set in internal relationships of rank. The intra-ethnic inventory include: "cholos", "schoolies", "players", "los americanizados" ( the Americanized), "Chuntaros"( rift raft, undesirable poor), " the Mexican-Mexicans", "county rushers", " punks" and "posers." The expressed divisions are characteristic of fluid boundaries involved in dialectic between-group relationships creating, modifying and challenging power, prestige and resources. The following text demonstrates that each identity is accompanied by respective educational, social, economic, and institutional opportunities and boundaries. The different identities exist as consequence of strategies of adaptation to socio-economic, political and national pressures. In a scholastic context, ethnic membership becomes a commodity of change responsive to survival mechanisms; identity models develop as abstract processes that are both self and externally defined and accompanied with real world consequences. The students must contend with and navigate identity fields they did not create. The demands, expectations and socioeconomic arrangements of the larger non curricular society are reflected and "acted out" on the school grounds.

Public concern about pervasive inequalities in traditional public schools, combined with growing political, parental, and corporate support, has created the expectation that charter schools are the solution for educating minorities, particularly Black youth. There is a paucity of research on the educational attainment of Black youth in privately operated charters, particularly on the issue of attrition. This paper finds that on average peer urban districts in Texas show lower incidence of Black student dropouts and leavers relative to charters. The data also show that despite the claims that 88-90% of the children attending KIPP charters go on to college, their attrition rate for Black secondary students surpasses that of their peer urban districts. And this is in spite of KIPP spending 30–60% more per pupil than comparable urban districts. The analyses also show that the vast majority of privately operated charter districts in Texas serve very few Black students.

The Art of Critical Pedagogy by Jeffrey M. Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-8204-7415-1. Many recognize the need for critical praxis to bridge “theory” and “practice” for social change, but few can explain what this actually entails. As standardized curricula and testing continue to crush the spirits of countless students and educators, however, The Art of Critical Pedagogy describes step by step how to navigate the current educational landscape and empower marginalized students by putting critical pedagogical theory into action. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell engage with students in participatory action research, embodying “theory as liberatory practice” (hooks, 1994) while responding to Freire’s (1997) appeal for reflective journaling on the pedagogical process. Accessibility of Theory and Application to Action Offering digestible theory without lofty jargon while simultaneously illustrating direct application of such theory to educational practice, this book proves accessible to practitioners and researchers and to novice and veteran teachers alike. From the very first chapter, the authors deconstruct current issues in urban education using theories to wipe clean, rather than smudge, the political and economic lenses necessary to see how some schools are designed to fail. They make clear connections between school realities and concepts such as “deficit model” thinking (Hull, Rose, Fraser, & Castellano, 1991; Valencia & Solorzano, 1997), “funds of knowledge” (Moll, 2000), socioeconomics (Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Anyon, 1981), “academic apartheid” (Akom, 2003), structural determinism and hegemonic practices (Gramsci, 1971), critical praxis against “banking education” (Freire, 1970), and more. Similarly, chapter 2, “Contemporary Developers of Critical Pedagogy,” not only offers one of the best overviews of critical pedagogy available, but also highlights both the “rock star” and “underground” educator-activists who have powerfully shaped the discipline. While some critics believe that critical pedagogy is weakened by its diverse philosophers’ discursive disagreements, this book successfully illustrates how such diversity provides a stronger framework for educational change. Each subsequent chapter grounds teacher practice in educational theory as Duncan-Andrade and Morrell describe their applications of critical pedagogy to five different high school learning environments: an English classroom, a women’s basketball team, a college access program for students of color, a teenage summer research seminar, and an ethnic studies course. For example, in the English classroom, the authors used Freire’s (1970) theories against banking education, Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development, and Smitherman’s

This paper describes an initiative that engages urban high school students, pre-service teachers, and university professors in liberatory practice. Rooted in Freirian pedagogy and using Participatory Action Research as a methodological tool, this initiative aims to provide opportunities for democratic engagement of all parties by forging dialogue, modeling liberatory pedagogy, and raising the critical consciousness of future teachers, particularly those committed to serving low-income children of color in our nation’s public schools. Implications for teacher development and partnerships between universities and K-12 schools are considered.